The quintessential venture capitalist’s uniform consists of a pair of designer jeans, a Patagonia fleece vest and $95 wool sneakers. The company behind the shoes, Allbirds , entered the unicorn club this morning with the announcement of a $50 million Series C from late-stage players T. Rowe Price, which led the round, Tiger Global and Fidelity Investments. The 3-year-old startup founded by Joey Zwillinger and Tim Brown has raised $75 million to date, including a $17.5 million Series B last year. Its backed by Leonardo DiCaprio, Scooter Braun, Maveron, Lerer Hippeau and Elephant, the venture capital firm led by Warby Parker founder Andrew Hunt. The Wall Street Journal is reporting the round values Allbirds at $1.4 billion. The company would not confirm that figure to TechCrunch. Like Warby Parker , San Francisco-based Allbirds began as a direct-to-consumer online retailer but has since expanded to brick-and-mortar, opening stores in San Francisco and New York. It currently ships to locations across the U.S., New Zealand, Australia and Canada. Next week, the company plans to open its first storefront in the U.K. in London’s Covent Garden neighborhood. It will begin shipping throughout the U.K. In 2019. Using its latest investment, Allbirds will double down on its brick-and-mortar business. In addition to the U.K., the company says it will open even more locations in the U.S., as well as open doors in Asia in the coming months. Tiger Global , which has backed Allbirds since its Series B, may be of help. The firm has offices in Hong Kong and Singapore, as well as partners across Asia

Bird, the scooter-sharing startup founded by former Uber VP of International Growth Travis VanderZanden, has brought a couple of former Uber employees to the flock. Joining Bird as VP and Head of Finance is Dennis Cinelli, who worked as Uber’s head of finance for global rides up until this month, according to his LinkedIn. Uber, of course, is not without a financial leader. In August, Uber’s lengthy search for a chief financial officer ended when the company hired Nelson Chai, the former CEO of insurance and warranty provider Warranty Group. Bird has also brought on Uber’s now-former director of corporate development Yibo Ling, who also worked at Uber up until this month, according to Ling’s LinkedIn. “As Bird enters its second year, we’re continuing to expand our talented executive team to build on and scale our momentum,” Bird founder and CEO Travis VanderZanden said in a press release. “Dennis and Yibo both bring valuable experience expanding markets and I look forward to working with them closely as we continue on our mission.” Last month, Bird hit 10 million rides after about one year of operating. Earlier this month, Bird unveiled custom electric scooters and a delivery service for people to be able to rent scooters for a full day.

ArabianBusiness.com Entrepreneur of the Week: Calio's Ramy Al Kadhi and Latif Baluch ArabianBusiness.com In mid-September, Calio was featured as the “ App of the Day ” by the App Store, confirming that Ramy Al Kadhi and Latif Baluch were right to leave corporate careers in Dubai behind in the search of their own venture. With its unique “Host Accounts ...

Editor’s note: This post originally appeared on TechNode , an editorial partner of TechCrunch based in China. Maimai , China’s biggest rival to LinkedIn, has revealed today that it received a $200 million D Series investment back in April in what the company claims to be the largest investment in the professional networking market. That’s surprising but correct: LinkedIn went public in 2011 and was bought by Microsoft for $26 million in 2016 , but it raised just over $150 million from investors as a private company. Global venture capital DST led the round for Maimai which include participation from existing investors of IDG, Morningside Venture Capital, and DCM. The new capital takes Maimai to $300 million raised from investors, according to Crunchbase . Caixin reports that the valuation of the company is more than $1 billion which would see the firm enter the global unicorn club. Beyond the fundraising, the firm said it plans to invest RMB 1 billion (around $150 million) over the next three years in a career planning program that it launched in partnership with over 1,000 companies. Those partners include global top-500 firm Cisco and Chinese companies such as Fashion Group and Focus Media. This investment could be the last time Maimai taps the private market for cash. That’s because the company is gearing up for a U.S. IPO and overseas expansion in the second half of 2019, according to the company founder and CEO Lin Fan. Launched in the fall of 2013, Maimai aims particularly at business people as a platform to connect professional workers and offer employment opportunities. The service now claims over 50 million users. As a Chinese counterpart of LinkedIn, Maimai has competed head-on with Chinese arm of the U.S

LinkedIn will open up its data to academic researchers for the purpose of better understanding the labor market and the economy, Bloomberg reports. The company is inviting academics to submit study proposals that in some way involve analytics, econom...

LinkedIn , the Microsoft-owned social networking platform for the working world with over 500 million users, is making a significant change as it continues to look for ways to make its platform more useful (and used). The company is relaunching Groups by rolling it into its main app by the end of the month after quietly pulling the standalone app earlier this year , and it will be streamlining the service by cutting out several features, including an ability for Group administrators to pre-moderate comments; and a way to email send Group posts as emails to the whole group, while also adding in new features like threaded replies and the ability to post video and other media. An announcement detailing the changes was sent out to a select Groups power users earlier today, and we have confirmed the details with LinkedIn directly. Mitali Pattnaik, the product manager for Groups, said that some of the discontinuations — such as the ability to approve posts before they are live — are temporary and will make their way back to the app in some form over time. The moves come nearly three years after LinkedIn tried another approach to put some more wind into Groups’ sails. In 2015, the company hived off an updated version of Groups into its own standalone app . Included in the changes, Groups were made private with the aim of reducing some of the spam that people were posting. The bigger idea was that, with some 2 million Groups already on LinkedIn, users would be able to dedicate more time to posting, reading and managing (if they were admins) those groups, and creating new groups, once they were in their own app. And on the part of LinkedIn, it would help the company focus on developing features specifically tailored to the Groups experience. But the move did not go down well. In the wake of the changes, reports started to surface about how the moves stifled usage of groups, turning the platform into what some were calling a ghost town . And LinkedIn itself, it seems, was finding it a challenge to continue updating the app, even as LinkedIn itself was getting enhanced with new features. “Being a standalone app, Groups was not able to take advantage of the overall LinkedIn ecosystem,” Pattnaik said. “Everything from the news feed to notifications to search, these things move at a fast pace, and the minute the apps got separated the main app innovated at a much faster pace and became more advanced than the standalone Groups app.” LinkedIn then quietly pulled the Groups app in February this year, as it announced plans to integrate the feature

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